boiled meat

"To attack poverty by preaching voluntary poverty seems like madness....To be profligate in our love and generosity, spontaneous, to cut all the red tape of bureaucracy! ... To live with generosity in times of crisis is only common sense. In the time of earthquake, flood, fire, people give recklessly; even governments do this."
- Dorothy Day

Monday, October 03, 2005

how is it not?

I'm still amazed by the crowd that says race wasn't involved or is not an issue with the hurricane and the subsequent refugees. Consider:

By 3-1, African-Americans believe that federal aid took so long to arrive in New Orleans in part because the city was poor and black.

By an equally large margin, whites disagree.

Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 71% of blacks say the disaster shows racial inequality remains a major problem in this country.

56% of whites said this was not an important lesson from the disaster.

But now the issue is, where are these people going to live? Any houses for sale in your white suburbs? How many whites want a family from the superdome moving in next door? How about a couple of families moving in? C'mon, be honest. No, not my neighborhood -- everyone knows "half" of the evacuees have rap sheets. It sucks to be them, but for god's sake, I moved out to the suberbs to be away from that "element".

Black Mob rule is still a fear that we just can't seem to shake as a society. Ever since it was so succinctly depicted in the film "Birth of a Nation" (which the President at the time said it was like writing history with a lightning bolt), the fear of hordes of lazy, criminal blacks invading our neighborhoods and driving down home values is a latent part of our white psyche. Digby (link to the left) has been all over this.

So I'm not sure why we can't at least recognize that white's do have feelings/fears about the refugees and the refugees are equally concerned.

Dubois tackled this idea in "This Double Conciousness" back in the early 1900's. Specifically, if we currently look on the TV and see black Americans and not Americans, race is an issue.